Thaw
by Mariani
Summary: He has always hit the ground running. He doesn't know how to slow down; they taught him not to. But what if he stayed this time? Movie-verse. T for language and violence.


_If I forgot who I am,  
__would you please remind me?_

Rosi Golan, "Hazy"

He's eight years old the first time Bucky calls him his best friend.

They're nearly a year apart, and Steve is already small for age and gets his ass kicked nearly every single day, so Bucky never lets him go alone. He kills for Steve, or close to it, getting himself suspended countless times for schoolyard fights and angry words thrown like artillery. Steve may be a dragon, but Bucky is a knight, unbreakable in his iron armor and not the person you want on the hilt-end of the sword. He learns how to scrap early on and makes sure every other kid on the schoolyard damn well knows that Steve Rogers' best friend can throw a mean punch; then, on their first day back in '26, Steve gets shoved in the mud by a pair of fifth graders, new and from Virginia. So Bucky breaks both of their noses.

"Stay away from him," Bucky is yelling, even when a teacher shows up. "Do you hear me? Stay _away_. Don't touch my best friend. Don't ever touch him."

A week later, Bucky beats Anderson Hobbes bloody after he steals the fifty cents Steve finds on the street. He tells Steve that, if he can't keep all of the bullies away, he'll make sure Steve at least knows how to fight.

Steve's thinking that maybe he can do this after all.

* * *

Steven Rogers and Bucky Barnes make eye contact on a roof for the first time in seventy years and don't even realize it.

Steve is running, sweating and heart hammering, and Bucky has Captain America's shield firmly clamped in his prosthetic hand when it happens. Steve is thinking about Director Fury back in his apartment, dead because of the muzzled man in front of him and not because of his brainwashed best friend, and Bucky is not thinking anything because he is the Winter Soldier, and his thoughts are a series of words fed to him like numbers to a calculator.

Steve looks right into Bucky's eyes and does not think, _That is my best friend, who I bled and hurt for._ He does not think, _The last time I saw him, he fell to his death._ He does not see Bucky.

Bucky looks right into Steve's eyes and does not think a single thing. He recognizes, rather, that this man is not a target, and throws the shield back so hard that it makes _Captain America_ skid backward.

Later, when Steve describes him to Natasha, he does not say, _He's my best friend._ He says, _He was fast...and strong. Had a metal arm._

Maybe it's better that way.

* * *

He's ten years old when he throws his first punch.

Jack Bennigan, a seventh grader from the middle school, doesn't like Steve's big mouth, and fractures Steve's cheekbone one night when he's coming home from Buck's baseball game at school, so Bucky spends the next few Saturdays in the alley behind their apartment building, teaching Steve to block with the outside of his arms and to tuck his thumb in when he punches, and to learn to anticipate what his opponent will do and _knock him on his ass for it._

Steve always finds it funny when Bucky uses grown-up words. But he listens.

When Jack tails Steve three days later, it's Steve who takes him by surprise when he whirls around and his fist slams into the side of Jack's face. Bucky buys him a banana split for it.

"Next I'm gonna teach you to hit with this," Bucky says after, tapping his bat against his cleats as they walk out of the diner. Steve, mouth full of ice cream, just laughs.

* * *

Natasha tells him, _The Winter Soldier_, the way someone says the word _war_, or _pandemic_. Or _death_.

Steve does not know that the Soldier earned his name because of the chill that travels through people at his mere _mention_. How the people of Northern Europe, who live and breathe snow, still shiver with fright because of him. How he is the embodiment of sleet and cold and ice.

Neither of them know that the Soldier is Bucky Barnes.

* * *

He's eleven when his father goes back to Bellevue for trying to kill their downstairs neighbor with a knife.

It's the first time of many Steve hears Bucky's offering, _come and stay over, we can throw some couch cushions on the floor, it's no trouble, Steve._ And, at first, Steve thinks it's charity, but Bucky just smiles and throws an arm around him.

"Just me being a friend," he says. Steve keeps watching a spot on the concrete, and Bucky ruffles his hair. "C'mon, Steve."

Bucky's apartment isn't much warmer than Steve's, but his adoptive parents don't spend the night weeping and the mornings staring blankly at Steve as he asks them for things. And Bucky's there, warm and throwing jokes around even through chattering teeth, and he doesn't even care that Steve gets sick so often and keeps both of them awake at night with his asthmatic coughing – and it isn't so bad. Bucky's parents let him stay until his father comes back that summer, and by then he's wishing for a lifetime.

One time, when Steve sees Bucky's swollen eyes in the morning and tries to apologize, Bucky just smiles and says, "You'll make it up to me."

Steve knows that he'll never be able to, but that Bucky doesn't even care.

* * *

Bucky remembers.

He tries to, anyways. It's not safe to tell HYDRA anything, but they've wiped him clean so many times that he doesn't always remember that – and, as they're calibrating his next mission, he blurts out _Wait I knew him the man on the roof I knew him_, and he isn't sure what makes him do it, just that he _needs_ to tell them. Tell _someone_.

They call Pierce, and Bucky hears "You know what to do." And he knows, too, and there are already tears in his eyes when the machinery grabs hold of him and blacks out Steve Rogers just as he's desperately trying to claw his way into Bucky's mind.

The next day, he is the Winter Soldier again, a calm river of a man, and Captain Steven Rogers is a fugitive of SHIELD.

* * *

He's fourteen when Bucky gets a girlfriend.

He doesn't like her; the Depression has hit and hit hard, and she's the kind of girl with pearls on and a satin clutch who turns her nose up at people like Bucky and Steve. Like the whole _country_, practically. But Bucky is charming and beautiful at fifteen, prettier than should be allowed, and she lets him entice her until Bucky runs up the stairs to Steve's floor with the biggest grin on his face and lipstick on his collar.

Steve pretends to be happy for him, while his mother is passed out on the couch behind the door and his father is locked in his room.

The girl takes Bucky to all sorts of fancy parties every weekend, so Steve hardly sees him. He's grown terrifyingly content with the idea of his father's death – he practically looks forward to it now, praying that each blood-filled cough his father utters each night will be his last. He wants his father to die the way someone euthanizing a dog wants the animal to die: out of mercy. Because death would be better than life.

Sometimes, he wishes the same for his mother, and she's so thoroughly wrapped in the bottle, she's as dead as her husband.

After the fourth time knocking at Bucky's door and having to face the sad, sympathetic eyes of his adoptive parents, Steve gives up and starts spending the nights out on the stairwell, shaking horribly as snow falls on his shoulders. He doesn't explain his red fingers to Bucky in the morning, either. It's the one part of his history that Bucky will never know.

Three months later, Bucky breaks up with her.

"What happened?" The two of them are sitting on a bench; a shivering, starving line to a soup kitchen is snaking out behind them. "You get bored already?"

Bucky just shrugs. "She said you deserved to get your ass beat. So I got rid of her."

"Buck," Steve says, wincing, "you didn't have to."

"Yeah, I did, Steve."

He shakes his head. "You're crazy."

"No, I don't want the girl I'm seeing talking shit about my best friend." Bucky grins. "C'mon – let's go steal a root beer or something."

"And that's not crazy?" Steve mutters, but he still smiles when Bucky slings an arm around his shoulders and they start walking.

* * *

As Zola flashes the archive photos at Steve, he does not understand yet that this is meant to be a taunt.

In spite of being a mind coded into a computer, Zola still feels a sick delight in knowing that he's showing Steve Rogers what HYDRA – what Zola himself – did to Bucky Barnes. How they took a vibrant and brave man and scraped him into a sharp piece of ice.

Steve can only see a monster on the screen, and that's exactly what Zola wants, really.

* * *

He's sixteen when his father dies.

The funeral is unexciting and uneventful; his mother, himself, Bucky, and Bucky's parents show up, and the priest can't even pronounce his father's name properly. His mother can't scrape herself off of the pew to get home, so Steve walks before Bucky can track him down.

Of course, Buck's still waiting in front of Steve's apartment, and he strikes the same offer he did five years ago, but Steve would feel too weak accepting it now. Like he'd be accepting his own tragedy.

Bucky's persistent, though, and not sympathetic or pitiful at all (and for that, Steve could give him the goddamn world), and _gentle_ as he senses Steve's physical struggle to stay strong, helping him find the key. And when Steve says, _Thank you, Buck, but I can get by on my own_, Bucky just smiles, takes his shoulder, and says, _The thing is, you don't have to_, and Steve sighs, because he knows he's about to lose.

Then he smiles at Bucky, because maybe he's already lost, and Bucky's just trying to help him back to the starting line.

* * *

The Winter Soldier intercepts them on the bridge as they're taking Sidwell back to the Triskelion.

Steve is finally starting to understand the name – the Winter Soldier – the first time the Soldier throws a punch with that metal arm, and it _booms_ when it strikes Steve's shield. He's terrifying and dogged and hardly flinches as he goes hand-to-hand with Steve; the Soldier gets knocked back when he takes Steve down, and the effort to do so doesn't even shake him. He's like an unshakable, unbreakable machine.

Looking into his eyes up-close is like staring down through miles of ice.

When Steve rips the mask off, it's an accident, and in that split second before the Soldier turns, he's thinking, _someone horrifying. Someone broken, and bloody, and inhuman._ A monster to match the machine.

Then the Soldier turns to look at him, and Steve forgets how to breathe.

"_Bucky?_"

* * *

He's sixteen when he permanently moves in with Bucky.

His mother doesn't even notice, and it'll be years before Steve learns that she dies not long after his father.

It's kind of fun, at first, in spite of cold nights and colder showers and falling asleep used to Bucky's warm chest against his back. Instead of throwing couch cushions down, they permanently move into the same bed and, a few times, Steve comes close to death and Bucky loses his job after he gets caught stealing, but he promises it's okay, even if times are hard and jobs are scarcer than food. Steve just shakes his head because Bucky won't listen to a damn thing he says, no matter what.

In the winter of '35, when Steve is seventeen and Bucky is eighteen, a nasty strain of the flu sweeps through the diseased, poor New York, and a lot of little kids don't come back from Christmas break. Steve picks it up almost instantly, but this time, Bucky winds up getting sick, too, and spends the week laid up with Steve in bed.

"Couldn't leave you here all by yourself, could I?" Bucky grins before hacking into a tissue. "I know how you get when you're alone.

"Bucky," Steve laughs through a wet cough, "you're gonna get both of us killed, I swear."

Bucky laughs, too. "Please. Without me, you would have gotten stepped on a long time ago."

"Jerk."

"Punk."

They beam at each other.

* * *

_Eliminate the target._

He hears this a lot, and not much else. _Eliminate the targets_ sometimes, like when he took out that car with Howard and Maria Stark. _Eliminate the target. Eliminate._ It's the only music surrounded by nothing but silence. A song on a phonograph that eternally skips.

_Eliminate the target._

It's what he hears every time his fists strike blows against Steve Rogers; usually, his metal knuckles break the target's bones, but this target is stronger than most. Enhanced.

He adapts, and learns that while he's stronger and faster, he still has human weaknesses. He still winces and he'll still fall.

_Eliminate the target_ is what screams at him when he nearly drives the knife clean through Steve Roger's head. _ELIMINATE THE TARGET ELIMINATE THE _–

His target is clever and nearly as fast as he is, but his fatal flaw is that he fights to incapacitate, not to kill. Not like the Soldier, and the Winter Soldier cannot be incapacitated. He is a machine with an on-and-off switch and no in between. He fights until someone dies.

The target yanks the muzzle off and it's raw to be so exposed.

When he stands, he's still a little disoriented, long enough that the man can drink in his face.

The Soldier hardly recognizes any emotion other than terror or anguish, and for the first time, the man betrays neither. He –

"_Bucky?_"

Like a knife. Like a blinding, piercing light ripping into coal black dark. _Bucky_.

For the first time, a second voice pipes up:

_Bucky Barnes _ –

_ELIMINATE THE TARGET_ blares over it, and he replies, "Who the hell is Bucky?" because that's what chooses to come out. Then, he's yanked off of his feet, and the man vanishes from view for a moment.

_Eliminate the target._

He gets back up.

_Eliminate the target._

Yes. Okay.

Always.

"_Buck _–"

_ELIMINATE THE _–

Then, it's _interrupted_.

"_Bucky _–" _The man, laughing, but he's not a man, he's a boy "_– _Bucky you're gonna get both of us killed, I swear _–" _laughing laughing they are both _–

The target stands feet away, exposed. The gun is raised. And he does something he has never done before.

He hesitates.

* * *

He's eighteen when he first tries to enlist.

"And _I'm_ the crazy one?" Bucky cracks, thinking it's kind of cute until Steve comes home one night with the first of many "4F"s stamped on his enlistment card. It's the first time, and raw enough that it stings for a few, miserable days.

So Steve tries again.

Things have been getting rough in Europe again – to be fair, they never really smoothed out in the first place – and the US, more desperate to abate another World War than its own country's discomfort, tries its damnedst to keep the Fuhrer sated. Bucky spends many nights in front of the TV with Steve, angry but for different reasons, as Roosevelt tells the country that everything's under control.

Steve's nineteen when Bucky enlists, and he feels horrible when Bucky looks _ashamed_ to tell him that he got a "1A", after Steve's third "4F."

He feels even worse when, instead of feeling proud of Bucky, all he feels initially is a stab of resentment.

* * *

When Steve was young, all he dreamt of was being a soldier. Before he knew what it meant for him.

Today, he finds out that his best friend is not dead, but perhaps something worse than dead. That the ghost who's slaughtered twenty-four people has a name, and it's Bucky Barnes.

He tells Natasha and Sam, _Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky_, as if they can even begin to understand. Because even now, after close to a century in ice, Steve still had him. He had Bucky's death; he had the knowledge that Bucky died protecting him, caring for him.

Now, all he has is a ghost who looked right at him, and all he could say was, _Who the hell is Bucky?_

* * *

He's twenty-one when Europe plunges beneath the icy waters of the Second Great War.

By now, he and Bucky have their own places across from one another, and Steve spends the entire year waiting to wake up and find a note telling him that Bucky's been drafted, but he's still there each morning in his coveralls.

They pick up a job working the line, where Steve's the smallest but the most determined worker. He and Bucky have virtually no time to talk and spend most of their thirteen-hour shifts talking wordlessly across the conveyer belt. Steve's hands are small and package food with remarkable accuracy, while every week another guy is let go for having big, inept fingers and not enough patience. But it's still a hard job; Bucky nearly loses a finger to a metal slicer and they come home with seams scratched along their hands and not enough sleep chalked up in their bodies.

Steve's asthma is murder on his body and eventually he has to quit, while Bucky stays as long as he has to. Somehow, he stays beautiful like a rock that the riptide washes right over; girls in the street still secretly sigh and fan themselves and his rough hands don't scare them away when he touches their arms or holds their hands. But he hardly dates anymore, and Steve makes the mistake of blaming himself one night.

"Don't say that," Bucky replies. "Christ, Steve – I'm not _sacrificing_ anything for you. And so what if I was?"

"Doesn't seem fair to you, is all."

Bucky scoffs. "Come on. You think I'd do this if I didn't want to?"

"Well." Steve smiles. "No. I guess not."

"It's like I told you – I'm with you 'til the end of the line. Get that through that tiny, thick head of yours."

"You're still an asshole," Steve laughs. "You know that?"

Bucky grins. "Always."

Not long after, he helps Steve pick up work at a local diner, and Hitler starts a blitzkrieg on London.

* * *

Nothing is right after the bridge. His equilibrium has been rocked, and he needs answers – but when he tries to search for them, Pierce just shakes his head like the Soldier's a lost, hopeless cause, and tells his cronies, _Wipe him_.

They don't put him back in that awful freezer, but he knows better. After they're done and smile when he tonelessly offers a mission report, he doesn't tell them that he still remembers.

_Steven Rogers_ sings on repeat all afternoon. Even after they tell the Soldier to kill him.

* * *

He's twenty-three when Bucky gets the orders to go to Europe.

Steve doesn't even think about it. He hugs Bucky goodbye and returns a _Jerk_ to Bucky's _You're a punk_ just like they've always done, as if Bucky's going off to work and will be home after his shift. He's too angry and selfish and brewing about his tenth rejection to understand that this could be the last time: the last time he sees his best friend alive.

But he will, and they'll both be different men than they were. Bucky will have to look up for the first time ever to say _What happened to you?_ and it will not be a mutual question; neither of them will consider, or even realize, Bucky. That the Winter Soldier may be a ghost, even born that way – as a shadow – but already, he was very much alive.

* * *

Steve is oddly aware of what he has to do when Fury tells him HYDRA's plan.

It doesn't scare him, though, because he's so thoroughly convinced that he can bring Bucky back.

_He doesn't know you_, Sam tries to tell him, but Steve doesn't even blink. Because it's true, isn't it? The Winter Soldier is not the same as Bucky Barnes. And thank God for that.

_He will_, he replies.

* * *

On the front, Bucky gets sore a lot. He hates the winter and the cold, which sticks to his body like sleet, and Steve's hands are big enough now that he can rub the war out of Bucky's stiff back every night.

Steve doesn't notice. He never does; he doesn't notice that Bucky's nearly as fast as he is and has the eye of an eagle and punches hard enough to break bone. He's too happy, too overjoyed that he's fighting the war and _winning_ it with his best friend beside him.

Bucky is responsible, in a way, for a lot of things. Steve's euphoria – then, after he falls off the train, Steve's first-ever thirst for blood.

Killing Red Skull isn't enough. Watching the very power he hungered for destroy him will never be enough, but Steve doesn't even have time to mourn. He cries _I'm gonna have to put her in the water_ and he's not thinking of Bucky as he plunges beneath the icy waves and loses seventy years.

In the end, Steve will only be left wishing that Bucky stayed at the bottom of that canyon.

* * *

_Block using the outside of your arms._

_Go for the knees and eyes. Headbutts are really useful, too_.

The Soldier does not know that a lot of what Captain America fights with, he taught him.

Steve tries to beg, and his stomach drops when he sees that the Soldier is made of steel on the other end of the bridge. Until they first raise their fists to one another and something is _off_, knocked out of place – Steve hopes – by him. The Soldier is reckless and the ice behind his eyes has cracked, giving way to the ocean.

Bucky's eyes used to sparkle when he smiled.

Steve dares to hope, even when the Soldier snatches his cartridge and makes him work for it.

_Drop it_, Steve demands, but, even with his good arm pinned, the Soldier won't budge. So Steve breaks it and it's Bucky who screams out, and Steve locks him in a chokehold so he won't have to hear it again.

_I don't think he's the kind of guy you save. He's the kind you stop._

Steve is aware that putting the Soldier out for a minute isn't enough. But he tries, still, because he still has a directive, until the Soldier comes back and unloads three bullets in Steve. His aim is off – everything, just a little bit off – but he's still accurate enough to start a fire in Steve's stomach that nearly takes him.

Then he slides the circuit board into place and his brokenly spluttered _Charlie lock_ feels like saliva in HYDRA's face.

Hill tells him to get out of there, and he tells her no, leave him, and lets her think that it's for them.

But dying next to Bucky would be better than watching it happen again.

* * *

Steve's thinking of jumping when Bucky screams again, below him, and it's _him_, looking up through the wreckage and flame. A huge chunk of the helicarrier has fallen on top of him.

_Convince him not to run._

It nearly kills Steve to free him, and the Soldier doesn't even try to touch him as he staggers to his feet. So Steve seizes the silence.

"You know me," he grits out. The Soldier's eyes jerk toward him and, for a moment, he's home.

"No I _don't_," he roars then, and Steve's world explodes into stars.

* * *

"You've known me your whole life," the target says with eerie calm, as if he couldn't possibly be wrong, and it actually _scares_ him.

"_SHUT UP_," he demands – _eliminate the target_ that awful voice whispers, and Bucky swings.

Even that doesn't stop it.

_You're my best friend, you know that?_

_I know._

"I'm not gonna fight you," Steve says. Bucky watches the shield drop to the rocky, black water below; Steve stares at him with swollen, determined eyes.

"You're my friend."

_ELIMINATE_ –

The Soldier roars to life within him, and he pins Steve against a steel beam that hangs like a bone from the helicarrier's shattered body.

"_You're my mission_," he growls to that broken, unwavering face, and he beats and beats and beats it in, but Steve's face does not collapse beneath blood and flesh, even as metal rains down on him.

The Soldier raises his arm one last time, and the target says –

"Then finish it."

Another waver.

"Because I'm with you 'til the end of the line."

He –

– _with you 'til the end of the line, pal, the man says, and that man is him._

_The target _– _a name a name _Steve – _smiles up at him, and there is nothing but love in his eyes._

Something huge and permanent grinds to a halt inside of him, as the Soldier feels himself start to cry.

Steve plummets to the water below.

* * *

He's ten when he learns how to swim.

He's years behind the other kids, and most summer days at the pool are spent sitting on a deck chair while Bucky does laps.

One day, older, meaner kids from down the block throw him in, and Steve nearly drowns until Bucky's strong hands pull him out, hacking and coughing as the come up from the shallow end.

Bucky is dogged and determined as he pulls Steve toward a deck chair, ignorant of the stinging laughter, and Steve is all but burning in Bucky's iron grip.

"You're making yourself look like an idiot," he mutters, "you know that?"

"So what?"

"Let me go, Buck."

"Nope. Never gonna let you fall," Bucky says cheerfully. "Not while I'm around."

They don't know it yet, but they'll both fall, one day.

* * *

He doesn't know why. He doesn't know why he chooses to save this man, Steve. Because he has to. Because he always has. He knows this as surely as he could know anything.

His hand feels familiar when Bucky pulls it up above the waves. As if it's been there before.

It has. He knows this, too.

Pulling Steve to shore, he thinks of running. He could do it. Steve's still coming to and no one's there to see him. To stop him.

_Steve_, the new voice in his head whispers. He hasn't felt love in decades. But there it is.

Maybe he could stay.

* * *

_Thank you, Buck._

_Anything for you, Steve._

* * *

When Sam comes, the Soldier is standing over Steve; the stockpile of weapons he carries are arranged along his back. Hands empty.

The officers aim their guns at the Soldier, unaware of what he is and screaming for him to stand back, and Sam doesn't have time to warn them. But then, he sees that he doesn't need to.

Both flesh and metal arms go up.

* * *

"Steve? _Steve_."

Mumbling. A thin thread of water still trickles from his lips.

"Oh thank God," Sam's voice says, somewhere above him. "Steve, you –"

_I'm not gonna fight you._

"Where is he?"

"Hmm?"

The sky. A blinding, unforgiving blue, and towers of smoke smear it like dirt.

"Where is he?" Steve rasps.

"Steve." Sam winces. "He –"

Steve sits straight up, and an icicle of pain skewers his stomach. He doesn't care.

He's still dripping, and handcuffed; the back of a patrol car waits for him like a coffin with its lid open. He doesn't have to; he's letting it happen.

He's Bucky.

"Steve," Sam says again, softer, as Steve stares. "Don't do this, okay? They're gonna take him. He needs help."

As they drag him away, the Soldier's head rips up one last time.

He and Steve lock eyes. Then the cruiser door slams shut.

**end**


End file.
